The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

at a German trade firm, develops their strategy. Or maybe Danish, I don’t remember. No physicist came ofhim, that’s a fact. Nothing’s ever come of anyone doing science in their free time. Science is not your folk art, be so kind to observe.
    Maybe I could get a stand-up routine going: Old whore crying over her lost chastity? In the subway, with that ocarina accompaniment?
    To tell myself, straight, what I’ll never have the guts to tell her about myself: Adrian Vatamanyuk, you’re a loser. Yes, you’re only thirty-four, and you’ve accomplished certain things in this life, you eat your bread with butter and even caviar, have a business and like it (love it, in fact), own an apartment in Kyiv—one of Europe’s most expensive cities, let’s not forget, and a small capital—have friends, and finally, the most important thing, the love of your life. Your defeat is looking quite successful. Indeed, so successful that no one, except you, can see it.
    It is nested so deep inside me that it’s long ceased being a foreign body. It’s become part of me.
    I didn’t break down. No, no one broke me. I got scared. And my breaking point was truly the day I caught myself looking for a cigarette butt I could pick up and put in my pocket. I’d seen our engineers finishing someone else’s before—the guys would “disinfect” them by running the filter ends through a match flame. Half of our class had fled into business already; rumor had it some of the faculty had turned to small “shuttle trade”; someone had seen Assistant Professor Rybachuk at the flea market with spare parts and burnt-out lightbulbs (which people bought to screw in at work, after taking the good ones from work home for themselves)—although not in Kyiv itself but in Irpin: there was a “professors’ flea market” there for those who still would’ve been ashamed to have anyone they knew, let alone a student of theirs, come by their spread. It was only later that our professorate caught on to the notion that grades, exams, and diplomas were also commodities for which one could charge students money without having to stand out in the cold or even to leave the building; and back in the nineties the country still roiled in a violent chemicalreaction whose outcomes carried some to the top and sank others to the bottom.
    There, at the bottom, in the increasingly visible deposit were accumulated the paupers, the hoboes with dollies and plaid oilskin bags the size of suitcases, people with no age, with dead eyes and faces that looked like they’d been sewn from linen crumpled damp and never ironed out. A few years ago, at the door to Pantagruel, I was assaulted, with demented roaring and open arms, by one such half-decomposed Lazarus fresh out of the grave; with horror, I recognized him to be Sashko Krasnokutsky from my class—we’d solemnly declared ourselves milk brothers once, after we’d found out we’d both slept with the same ever-willing lab tech from the radio physics department, Ilonka-the-Barbie.
    “We’d sucked at one tit!” Sashko had roared happily at me then, and his roar hadn’t changed since his student days at all, still sounded like a bike without a muffler, only it wasn’t so easy to tell that it was, in fact, Sashko, that was doing the roaring: he was missing front teeth, and kept slurping up his spit. There was something caricaturish about our run-in at the restaurant, from which I’d just rolled out all fat and glossy like the bronze cat they had by the door—stuffed with a good dinner and a half bottle of Beaujolais Villages—and here was this toothless monster like something dug out of a trash heap slapping me on the shoulders with the choking roar, fit for the loony bin, “Huw’sh it shakin, bud!” This could have looked like a prank, like a skit based on the well-known joke about the two old classmates:
    “And how’s your life?”
    “I haven’t eaten in three days!”
    “Hey, man, that’s no good; you gotta make yourself do it!”
    Only a purposely bad skit, crude and grotesque, as life always looks when it aims to imitate folklore and other literature. Plus there was one “but,” one departure from the text: Sashko wasn’t about to complain to me about not having eaten for three days, not at all. In fact, he seemed to be completely oblivious to the dramatic contrast between us and went on babbling as obliviouslyand cheerfully as if it were he and not I who’d just finished some young